This timeline places the Denisovans firmly within the period that paleoanthropologists had associated with archaic human forms in Asia — a period when the fossil record shows various hominin populations in the region, including what had previously been described as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, and other named forms.

The genetic identification of the Denisovans has complicated these taxonomic assignments significantly, because it suggests that the Asian populations of this period were more genetically distinct from each other, and from the Neanderthals, than the fossil record alone had indicated.

The geographic range of the Denisovans, as established by the combination of fossil finds and genetic evidence from modern populations, appears to have been vast.

While the fossil remains are concentrated in the Altai region, the signature of Denisovan ancestry in living populations extends across a remarkable geographic range: it is found at highest levels in populations from Papua New Guinea, Australia, and other parts of the Pacific — people who live or whose ancestors lived at the opposite end of the Asian continent from Denisova Cave.